GTX285 vs Quadro 4000

Question

Hi guys! I have a question about comparison GTX285 and new Quadro 4000. I'm working with Final Cut Studio, Shake and Cinema 4D. How do you think, does replacing GTX285 with new Quadro 4000 will make performance boost? How huge it will be in this particular applications?

Answer 1

I tend to discount most of what I've seen on the blogger/review sites, they tend to either be game-centric, or not have a really great understanding of how a big machine (like the Mac Pro) gets used for pro video apps.
Hatter, has there been any confirmation yet on a consumer-level GTX570 card for the Mac, or is that speculation (or via flashed/hacked drivers)?
As Hatter said though, answers would have to be 'in theory' at this time, since the Quadro 4000 for Mac hasn't yet shipped (or at least arrived yet, I've got mine on order). Guessing/speculating can be extremely difficult, too, since it's a case of comparing Apples to Oranges (sorry, couldn't resist). The GTX285 is a 'consumer-grade' card which is hardware and driver-optimized for performance where it matters in gaming, and the Quadro series is 'pro-grade' and is hardware/driver-optimized for performance in pro apps (in this case, 3D rendering, data modeling, etc).
According to representatives I've spoken with at nVidia, the Quadro 4000 should easily deliver at least twice the performance of the Quadro FX 4800 (and as much as 5-8x faster in certain operations). The Quadro FX 4800 card was considered to be 2-3 times faster than the GTX-285 (depending on the application you're using). I've never owned a Quadro card myself so I haven't done extensive testing with one, but from the demos and time spent playing around with other peoples' machines that had Quadro FX 4800's installed, I don't think it's a false claim.
I can tell you that you won't see a huge improvement when it comes to Final Cut Studio... for now. There's an upgrade due in the spring that will hopefully be able to take better advantage of newer technology (not just in GPU's, but with your whole machine), hopefully then you'll see a massive improvement.
Adobe's Premiere Pro and After Effects CS5 have support for nVidia's CUDA technology, which lets them perform certain functions up to 10 times faster than without hardware acceleration. And the part I like most, a lot of stuff that would previously have required rendering in order to preview can easily be done in real-time. That's with just the GTX-285, having the Quadro 4000 will increase both the complexity and the number of layers that I can have in my projects and still get real-time performance.
The boost you see in C4D performance may depend on a number of factors, including what version you're using, what kind of work you're doing, and what plugins you're using. Octane Render is a ray-tracing plugin that looks incredibly promising, tapping into CUDA to boost the speed of ray-traced renders. I don't use C4D but some folks I consult with do (and have interest in ray tracing), for them the Quadro 4000 (or even better, putting two Quadro 4000's in a single Mac Pro) could be a real game-changer. But even if you don't have CUDA-optimized ray tracing plugins, the performance increase should be in the neighborhood of 4-6x (twice the speed of the older Quadro card, which itself is 2-3x faster than the GTX-285).
Hopefully the card will start shipping soon, and we'll start to see the results first-hand.